Touch and Go Read Free Page A

think of the press agent, we think of a cigar chosen from the lobby counter, of the medicine man hawking Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, or a jolly backslapping as a matter of reflex. A genial drinking companion.
    Edward Bernays, in the manner of a medieval alchemist, had transmuted dross into the semblance of gold. It doesn’t matter that the work itself hasn’t altered. They are still coat holders for their clients. What Bernays had done, in fact, was to affect our daily working vocabulary. When I was in the tall grasslands of Inner Mongolia some twenty years ago, I heard the Chinese interpreter teach his Mongolian colleague what a PR man does. He used the actual English initials. I realized in that revelatory moment that, among words or phrases universally understood, whether you are in Inuit country or Tierra del Fuego, “PR” rates along with “Taxi!” and “No problem.” Some years later, in reflecting on the pretty girl in the Chesterfield ad pleading “Blow Some My Way,” I thought of Bernays. It may have been a sign that the wind was blowing his way.
    The last time I saw Bernays, he was approaching the century mark. He was frail and hard of hearing, and his memory played hide-and-seek at times, but he still had almost all his marbles.
    I put the earphones on him. It was a tape recording we had done years before. Immediately on hearing his younger voice, his face
glowed with the wonder of a child. The subject was the nature of his work and, in this instance, of his powerhouse client—the tobacco industry. He was recounting an early moment in the twentieth century, when the feminist movement was in its resurgence. Names come to mind. Margaret Sanger. Helen Keller. Alice Paul. Jane Addams. Florence Kelley. They were advanced in many areas. Certainly the evils of tobacco were among them. Bernays himself was pro-suffragist as well as a peace and civil-rights advocate. But he did have a job to do, one of his biggest as a public-relations counselor: to make smoking cigarettes not only acceptable to the suffragists but a sign of liberation! And, to some extent, he succeeded. As I remember our conversation, to which he was listening at that moment, pressing the earphones tighter to himself, eyes wonder-wide, he had talked some of the spokeswomen, militant and courageous, into smoking during their celebratory march on Fifth Avenue. Puffing away publicly, lighting small fires of flaming tobacco, was their symbol of emancipation. As I relieved him of his earphones, he looked up at me. Mouth slightly open; a small boy bewildered by something. Was he aware of his giftedness and triumph? Did he realize the nature of his works, his expertise?
    Parenthetically, Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Whenever he visited his uncle in prewar London he always presented him with a box of Havana cigars.
    Â 
    Â 
    MY FATHER was a master of his craft, too. He was a men’s tailor. I look at the gilt-edged daguerreotype of my two brothers, about four and six, in fancy woolen winter clothes sewn by Sam. What stand out are the earlaps, of identical corduroy fabric and design. They add just the right panache to the classy attire. You’d think the photo had been snapped by a Slavic Margaret Cameron. Oh, he was good, my father. I’m still much moved when I come across the picture of the three of us boys. There I am, in my little white nightgown, two years old, looking somewhat bewildered. I am standing
on a stool as my two brothers (each in short pants, made by my father, of course) pose protectively on each side of their darling baby brother. When my father and his young wife, Annie, arrived in New York from the Russian-Polish border city, Bialystok, they were both good at what they tackled. She was a nimble-fingered seamstress. When she was not at the factory during a strike or slack time, I still see her, in our living room, on her knees, pins in her mouth, fitting a